Advocate's Studio

Shirl Kennedy and ResourceShelf have compiled a GREAT list of resources for statistics on all things Internet, including participation in social networks and trends. While I encourage you to hit the jump to their site, I have copied their list and comments below for Studio reader convenience. There is sure to be some information of value to your on-line networking and ecommerce interests buried in these resources. Happy Hunting!

• ClickZ Stats (”News and expert advice for the digital marketer”)

“Trends & statistics: the Web’s richest source”

• A Collection of Social Network Stats for 2009 (Jeremiah Owyang, analyst, Forrester Research)

Stats on social networks are important, but I’m going to need your help in creating a community archive, can you submit stats as you find them? I’m often asked, “What are the usage numbers for X social network” and I’ve received considerable traffic on my very old post (way back in Jan 08) of MySpace and Facebook stats, even months later. Decision makers, press, media, and users are hungry for numbers, so I’ll start to aggregate them as I see them.

• comScore press releases

comScore is a global leader in measuring the digital world and the preferred source of digital marketing intelligence.

The company also publishes a blog that is statistics-rich.

• Domain Counts & Internet Statistics (DomainTools)

Welcome to Domain Tools’s daily domain statistics page. Our stats show how many domains are currently registered and how many domains used to be registered but are now deleted.

• E-Stats – Measuring the Electronic Economy (U.S. Census Bureau)

The U.S. Census Bureau’s Internet site devoted exclusively to ‘Measuring the Electronic Economy.’ This site features recent and upcoming releases, information on methodology, and background papers.

• Facebook Press Room: Statistics
  Facebook publishes its own set of frequently updated statistics about growth, “user engagement,” etc.
• How big is the internet? (News.com Australia)

The internet has permeated everything from buying to banking to bonking. So how big is it?

• Information and Communication Technology Statistics (International Telecommunications Union)

As a United Nations agency, the ITU has an obligation to identify, define, and produce statistics covering its sector – the telecommunication/ICT sector.

• Nielsen Wire: Online and Mobile
  Weblog that alerts you to the results of current Nielsen surveys and reports.
• Pew Internet and American Life Project: Get the Latest Statistics

Browse a list of our latest reports, look through out infographic highlights, and check out our freqently updated trend data.

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• Google Now Charts Unemployment And Other Public Data In Search Results (techcrunch.com)
• Can Twitter Challenge Facebook Connect? (allfacebook.com)

Merging the ideas of free and open source into both the subject and the product, Andrew Katz has launched a new Free and Open Source Law Review online. Taken from the site:

The International Free and Open Source Software Law Review (IFOSS L. Rev.) is a collaborative legal publication aiming to increase knowledge and understanding among lawyers about Free and Open Source Software issues. Topics covered include copyright, licence implementation, licence interpretation, software patents, open standards, case law and statutory changes.

Sections include case law reviews, full-length research articles, book reviews and ‘tech watch’ reports by non-lawyers. Articles are accepted for publication via the Review’s web site, and are subject to anonymous peer review where appropriate.

The Editorial Committee of the Review is drawn from the membership of the European Legal Network, a non-partisan professional network of Free Software legal experts, and its composition rotates regularly among network members. The network is facilitated by Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), but the membership extends across a broad spectrum of interests engaging in Free Software across four continents. The Review itself receives financial and administrative support from the NLNet Foundation.

Volume 1, Number 1 (2009) is up and running at the jump above. Oh, and you can follow it on Twitter too – @ifosslr.

Hat tip to BoingBoing blog.

Thanks entirely to Robert Ambrogi’s LawSites, a perpetual wealth of legal information of the free and on-line variety, I learned today of a new site called FreeCourtDockets. This site offers federal civil, criminal and bankruptcy court dockets, and material from the Supreme Court, Court of Claims and Court of International Trade.

Remembering fondly, here, those frantic calls to Iowa looking for a court docket on a dusty old case, then writing a check, then sending the check, and then patiently waiting for the pound of paper to return via U.S. Postal Service. Ain’t technology grand?

Nice resource for lawyers:  MentorCLE offers free on-line courses on legal subjects for Illinois lawyers. Included is this course on Persuasive Writing For Lawyers by Helen Gunnarsson. You can pay $19.95 to convert your time into an hour of CLE credit.

There is a list of a number of great presentations on the site here. Got 15 minutes and a cup of coffee? Why not learn something new? Great job, MentorCLE!

… or traditional institutions will suffer the consequences. Yasar Tonta at Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey focuses his lense on libraries and stresses that they must “evolve or die” when it comes to digital technology and connectivity in his article Digital Natives and Virtual Libraries: What Does The Future Hold For Libraries?. Tonta initially explains the different styles exhibited by “digital natives” (those who were born and raised in a world surrounded by modern computing and technology) and “digital immigrants” (those who came to the digital realm from their previous analog existence). While recognizing that libraries must continue to cater to both groups, Tonta urges institutions to be mindful of the need to offer an experience catering to the digital native or risk “extinction.” Until such time as digital natives comprise 100% of the user base, librarians must run their show in both the real and virtual world.

To this end, Tanto suggests that libraries forge relationships with their patrons that represent a give-and-take: offering bi-directional service and information flow back and forth between institution and client. Tanto speaks in terms of “diffusing” and “concentrating” services. Diffusion entails building relationships between people, applications and data through services like blogs, wikis and social networking, while concentration involves pulling users into major hubs of information, such as Google and Amazon.

I found particularly compelling Tanto’s direction that libraries must move from being “resource-centric” towards becoming “relationship-centric”, emphasizing a more personalized service. Tanto also points out that technologies “converge” just as the facets of our lives converge – business, social, professional, personal. Thus, the library is tasked with effecting its own “convergence” by melding its own curated resources with the freely available resources of the Web and entering the on-line “hangouts” that digital natives inhabit. To survive, libraries must meet the more demanding needs of digital natives as they replace digital immigrants as clients.

Finally, more is required of institutions than merely becoming digital destinations. Libraries must actively seek to enter the actual networks of digital natives and meet them where they live. Tanto closes with this quote:

In libraries’ part, this requires “connectivity, communications, and content” (Social, 2009) so that library resources and services can be more visible and usable from within social networking systems. This seems to be the way forward for libraries if they are to tackle the impact of the convergence of technologies and the convergence of people’s social lives.

I daresay that the reader could insert the name of just about any institution for the word “library” in this article and the same conclusions still hold true. Consider the plight of law firms as they experience pain from this compulsion to effect major change and are forced to  learn how to deal with both clients and new hires firmly inhabiting the virtual space. Firms that cater to digital immigrants will soon be as obsolete as their client base. Firms catering to digital natives not only will learn how to speak the language, but also will understand how to walk the walk along the highways and byways of the on-line world, stopping to socialize at all the best hangouts.

Hat tip to Resource Shelf.